The new design was sleeker than its predecessor, with a streamlined cabin and character lines across the hood, fenders, and rear pillars. Modern Porsches are still frameless as well They used to be framed. As with its predecessor, anti-lock brakes were standard. Production occurred between July and September at the Tsutsumi plant in Toyota, Aichi , [10] supplemented until December with the Miyata plant at Miyawaka, Fukuoka.

Lexus ES / | Consumer Guide Auto

As a nameplate, Lexus is now old enough to consume alcohol in all fifty states. Make no mistake, though: Toyota and Nissan each launched with a mostly clean-sheet big V8 sedan and a warmed-over home-market showroom filler.

To keep the new LS from being lonely in the showrooms, a quick nose job was done on a JDM faux-hardtop midsizer, and the ES was born. The Q45 badge moved to the rather dismal Nissan Cima before completely fading away. The M30 was a sales catastrophe, to put it mildly. It was the humblest of the original four offerings from Lexus and Infiniti that would go on to conquer, if not the world, then at least the continent of North America.

Today, Lexus is one of the top-volume luxury brands in the market. Lexus is one of the most famous success stories in the industry, but it began with a straight badge-engineering job of a nearly obsolete car. As a result, nearly every major Japanese sedan sold in the Eighties and Nineties was either a frameless-window car as was the case with the first-generation Infiniti M45, sold in Japan as the Nissan Cedric or was available in a more expensive, frameless-window variant as with the Honda Accord Inspire and Toyota Corona EXIV.

The advantages of using the Vista as the second Lexus were obvious. It could easily be made to comply with US regulations and it would be immediately familiar to Toyota owners looking to trade up.

In the winter of my father had his Jaguar XJ6 towed out of his garage stall to the dealership for the fourth time in about as many months. I advised that he try a Lexus as a temporary change in pace. I meant that he should buy an LS, but upon his trip to the dealer he decided that.

And thus the old man acquired a two-tone-blue ES The steering wheel was different, the radio stack was different, and there were better seats in the car. The motor was surprisingly reluctant to rev, given that it was a 2.

It was also gutless at all revs; I got the somewhat mistaken impression that it was about as quick as my powered Mercury Marquis coupe.

On the freeway, it had less mechanical noise than a Camry but a fair bit more wind noise. The steering was loaded with syrup and the brake pedal sank halfway to the floor before providing any effective retardation. On the positive side, the stereo was very good and the interior was clearly screwed together with fastidious attention.

The leather seats cracked, the dash faded to a whiter shade of blue, and the electronics started to quit.